We’ve just come across an IRC controlled backdoor that enables the infected machine to become a bot for Distributed Denial of Service attacks. The interesting part about it is that it’s a Mach-O binary – targeting Mac OS X. ESET’s research team compared this to samples in our malware collection and discovered that this code

One of the (few) blessings of having been so long in this industry is that I remember a time when most malware was viral and Trojans were rare: so rare, in fact, that there was at one time a notorious "dirty dozen" set of Trojans. At around the same time, there were innumerable hoaxes describing malware with

The US Department of Justice's announcement yesterday of the takedown of the command and control (C&C) servers for the Coreflood bots (detected by ESET as Win32/AFCore) and seizure of their domains marks another step in the growing awareness that crime, whether it is committed with bullets or with botnets, is still crime. This particular botnet,

Here’s a little information from ESET’s point of view about the Coreflood botnet, whose C&C (Command and Control) servers were taken down yesterday by the Department of Justice. The Coreflood bot is detected by ESET products as Win32/Afcore and has been active since the early years of the last decade (certainly since 2001), though our

WordPress.com is a popular blogging host. Recently, for unknown reasons miscreants launched a massive distributed denial of service attack (DDOS) against WordPress.com. According to TechCrunch (http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/03/wordpress-com-suffers-major-ddos-attack/) WordPress.com is responsible for 10% of the websites in the world. So far I have not seen anyone take responsibility for the attacks. With so many websites being hosted

Our colleagues in ESET Latin America have just blogged about an interesting botnet creation tool: the original blog is at http://blogs.eset-la.com/laboratorio/2010/05/14/botnet-a-traves-twitter/, by Jorge Mieres and Sebastián Bortnik, Security Analysts. (Mistakes in interpretation are, as usual, down to me!) In the last years we have seen many security incidents driven by botnets and exploiting the technologies

1. Every security blogger in the world will mark the transition from 2009 to 2010 with at least one top ten something-or-other article. Except me, of course. 2. There will be headlines about the death of anti-virus, and a famous security guru will state that anti-malware only catches malware that's already been identified and analysed, that

I came across a nice article today by Dennis Fisher on “The Root of the Botnet Epidemic”. It's the start of what looks like an interesting series on "the roots, growth and effects of the botnet epidemic" and the first aricle takes a historical overview of the situation around the turn of the century, looking

As I write this, Twitter, the popular social networking site is experiencing a distributed denial of service attack. I do not know where the attacks are originating from, or the reason, but it occurs to me there may be hell to pay. So what motives? Perhaps the bad guys are upset that Twitter has recently

How secure is your Social Security Number? If your answer is "Very: I only ever give it to organizations who are entitled to know it", that may not be as safe as it sounds. Of course, there are a couple of fairly generic issues: some legitimate, convenient organizations may ask for it who are, nevertheless,

Cyber war or Cyber hype? On July 4th several US government web sites were hit with a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. In human speak that means you couldn’t get to those web sites because too many other computers were making them unavailable. Many of the attack failed, but some sites, like www.ftc.gov effectively

If it was the intention of the Conficker gang to create a huge splash, they succeeded. (In fact, it’s quite possible that they’ve attracted more attention than they really wanted.) In any case, it seems that lots of people are looking nervously over their shoulders for any indication that something unpleasant and Conficker-related is about

When I write about Mac issues, I usually find myself abused by individuals convinced that there are no Mac viruses, never were any Mac viruses, and never could be any Mac viruses. Less advanced cases sometimes admit that there is Mac malware (and malware that isn’t Mac-specific, but can affect Mac users), but buy into

I don’t, of course, know for sure what’s going to happen on April 1st, when Conficker is timed, potentially, to go to its next stage of evolution. We do know, from inspecting code in the variants and subvariants that have come our way, that infected machines will be looking for instructions and updates on that date. At the very least,

DroneBL, a site that tracks IP addresses that considered vulnerable to abuse that some sites use for its DNSBL (blocking list), blogged yesterday on the fact that it’s been subjected to a Distributed Denial of Service attack (DDoS), apparently by systems infected with malware going by the name of psyb0t. According to the blog, this

I spend so much time on this blog, that I’ve been neglecting the other blogs I’m supposed to contribute to from time to time (including my own, though I’ve just started to put some papers up there – more about that later). However, as the issue with the BBC’s possible breach of the UK’s Computer

The estimable Graham Cluley’ drew my attention in his blog to the fact that this is National Zombie Awareness Week in Australia. A zombie is security geekspeak for a PC that has been infected by a bot or agent, so that it’s added to a network of compromised machines (a botnet) under the control of